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HELENA DIETRICH

Artist in residence from March 03 ’till April 30 – 2014

BIO

Helena Dietrich is an artist currently living and working between Brussels, Belgium and Berlin, Germany. After finishing a master in european media at the university of Portsmouth, U.K., she decided to explore performance art at a.pass, posthogeschool for podiumskunsten in Brussels, Belgium.
Departing from her background as a designer, she is researching on the performative effects of visual communication. In her work she is concerned with finding techniques for the individual to realize the influences of the media on the constitution of the self. In participative performances she confronts the audience with their own unconscious life-style choices and exposes them to their own preconceptions with empathetic methods. She combines in her work the visual language of stereotypes and commercials with techniques and concepts known from religious or shamanistic contexts. By displacing form and content she challenges the impressions of the audience and forces them to question their own belief-system. In her charged installations she works one-on-one, using objects, images and costumes, ready-mades or created by her, as tools for the intimate performances.

PROJECT
A toolbox for channeling artistic research

The residency is a research about techniques that raise sensitivity towards what surrounds us, and how we perceive things around and in us. The focus is on understanding channeling as a technique and as a tool for being present and embodying life again. So as a discipline of tuning and un-tuning among different logics of perceiving and relating to things. To channel the work, becomes then not a moment of inspiration but a practice of listening to the work and its demand. This changes our position from a creator to a medium: to be in open to entities in objects, materials and signs and to be able to communicate and translate them.

During the residency of 2 months I will invite several artists to work on different techniques of channeling with me.